blog

recently, leo babauta of zenhabits posted this:the wisdom of allowing things to happen. i was going to include an excerpt here, but it's a short-ish post, and i really want you to read it or at least skim it, so will you scoot over there and then come back, please?

okay, now that you're back: i love a lot of leo's work, but this one is hard for me. maybe it's hard in the way that things are most difficult to digest when you most need to hear them?

there's a big emphasis these days, in this culture, on being in control of your own destiny, on setting goals and pushing like hell to meet them--whether the goal is to make a gazillion dollars or to make a gazillion arts-and-crafts masterpieces with your six-year-old or to make a gazillion mosquito nets for malaria-ravaged communities in africa.

for a very long time, my own goals have been based on a picture that i have in my head of what my best life would look like. the edges are fuzzed out a bit, and there's a fill-in-the-blank hole here or there, but it's essentially there. it's not too crazy, and it's not too run-of-the-mill. it's just the perfect fit for me.

so i've been pushing and pushing at the parts and pieces of my actual life, trying to get it to turn into my perfect-vision-best life. it hasn't happened yet. stuff keeps jumping into my actual life that isn't part of perfect-vision-best life. some of that stuff sucks. but then, some of it is pretty dang awesome.

i'm fairly sure this actual-life stuff-jumping is going to keep happening, so now i'm wondering if maybe leo's approach might be good for me: allowing things to happen. i keep getting hung up in two places, though.

one: where's the line? at what point does "allowing things to happen" turn into "being a passive puppet who never really gives it her all?"

and two: in our culture, can women do this "allowing things to happen" like men can?